Paris Review Explores the Life of Ingeborg Bachmann

For the newest installment of the Paris Review's "Feminize Your Canon" series, Emma Garman focuses her lens on Ingeborg Bachmann, whose 1971 novel, Malina, has just been reissued in an updated translation by New Directions. Garman remarks on Bachmann's radical departure from poetry in the early 1950s: "The narcotizing beauty of formal poetry, she had discovered, muffled her political intent." Later:

[Paul] Celan haunts the pages of the only novel Bachmann published in her lifetime, Malina, a highly original meditation on trauma. After her ex-lover’s death, she revised the recently completed manuscript with allegorical reimaginings of their relationship and explicit allusions to his poetry. Celan had given Bachmann a leaf when they first met in Vienna. Later, after he accused of her losing it, she resurrected it in her poem The Storm of Roses: “a leaf that met us drifts after us on the waves.” In Malina, Bachmann added an especially painful passage to a complex, feverish dream sequence, already layered with Holocaust and Nazi imagery. The nameless narrator encounters her “first love,” who must cross the Danube in a truck with his wife and child. A “gentleman” then announces he has news and shows her a “desiccated” leaf. “My life is over,” the narrator thinks, “for during the transport he has drowned in the river, he was my life, I loved him more than my life.”

Malina is told via a compulsive, challenging, and densely referential first-person present tense that slides between fantasy, reality, and the murky realm in between. The narrator, a successful author, is meant to be writing a novel titled Death Styles (also the title of Bachmann’s unfinished triptych of novels, of which Malina was intended as the first). What she actually does is compose (and often destroy) letters and telegrams, talk on the phone, smoke, and tolerate “an unending pain which hits each and every nerve at each and every minute of the day.”

Read on at the Paris Review.